The return of paganism

Continuing in the thread of the 12/28/18 post below, I want to point to a piece by Ross Douthat that suggests the return (or emergence) of a new spirituality that returns humans to their more fundamental roots of being a part of the natural order rather than its master. Some clips:

Institutional Christianity has weakened drastically since the 1960s...The mainline-Protestant establishment is an establishment no more. Religious belief and practice now polarizes our politics in a way they didn’t a few generations back.

...the secularization story — in which modern societies inevitably put away religious ideas as they advance in wealth and science and reason...is insufficient, because even with America’s churches in decline, the religious impulse has hardly disappeared. In the early 2000s, over 40 percent of Americans answered with an emphatic “yes” when Gallup asked them if “a profound religious experience or awakening”

...perhaps instead of secularization it makes sense to talk about a fragmentation and personalization of Christianity...in which traditional churches have been supplanted by self-help gurus and spiritual-political entrepreneurs.

Might there be

...a genuinely post-Christian future for America...the return of a pagan religious conception...A fascinating version of this argument is put forward by Steven D. Smith, a law professor at the University of San Diego, in his new book, “Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the Potomac.” Smith argues that much of what we understand as the march of secularism is something of an illusion, and that behind the scenes what’s actually happening in the modern culture war is the return of a pagan religious conception, which was half-buried (though never fully so) by the rise of Christianity.

...What is that conception? Simply this: that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.

...you can build a plausible case for a “pagan” (by Smith’s definition) tradition in Western and American religion, which takes two major forms...First, there is a tradition of intellectual and aesthetic pantheism that includes figures like Spinoza, Nietzsche, Emerson and Whitman, and that’s manifest in certain highbrow spiritual-but-not-religious writers today. Smith recruits Sam Harris, Barbara Ehrenreich and even Ronald Dworkin to this club...Second, there is a civic religion that like the civic paganism of old makes religious and political duties identical, and treats the city of man as the city of God (or the gods), the place where we make heaven ourselves instead of waiting for the next life or the apocalypse.

These do not offer

...a practice of ritual and prayer of the kind that the paganism of antiquity offered in abundance. And that absence points to the essential weakness of a purely intellectualized pantheism..However, there are forms of modern paganism that do promise this help...the countless New Age practices that promise health and well-being and good fortune, the psychics and mediums who promise communication with the spirit world, and also the world of explicit neo-paganism, Wiccan and otherwise...To get a fully revived paganism in contemporary America...the philosophers of pantheism and civil religion would need to build a religious bridge to the New Agers and neo-pagans, and together they would need to create a more fully realized cult of the immanent divine, an actual way to worship, not just to appreciate, the pantheistic order they discern.